Theater Review, Young Jean Lee

Young Jean Lee's aversion therapy theater provokes weird laughter - South Bend events | Examiner.com Log in Become an Examiner South Bend

47

South Bend, INSouth BendEntertainment Sports & Recreation Family & Home Lifestyle Health & Beauty

Search

News & Info

South Bend / Arts & Entertainment / Arts & Exhibits

Your ad here

Advertisement

Young Jean Lee's aversion therapy theater provokes weird laughterJessica Peri Chalmers, South Bend Events Examiner March 29, 2010 - Like this? Subscribe to get instant updates. Add a commentShare

Email

Print

Young Jean Lees The Shipment at the MCA Chicago March 23, 2010 In recent years, Young Jean Lee has been the toast of the downtown New York City alternative theater scene. She is indisputably attractive as a younger person in the game she was born in 1974 in a theater world dominated by an older generation. She is attractive as a Korean-American in a theater world that has recognized relatively few AsianAmerican voices. She is, however, no David Henry Hwang, the writer whose Tony-award-winning M. Butterfly drew a large audience with its themes of romance, cross-dressing, espionage and ritual self-disembowelment. Instead, YJL is a hardcore avant-gardist. As a student of the experimental

Offer of the day $50 to Spend on Women's Clothing and AccessoriesHarvesting a few new outfits this fall is a great way to...More info $25.00 50% off

Prentice Onayemi in the Shipment at the Museum of Contemporary Art, ChicagoPhotos by Paula Court and AJ Zanyk

Related articles IUSB Michiana Monologues to present a rich range of women's stories in Elkhart & Goshen Indiana University, South Bend concert celebrates African-American composers and musicians

playwright Mac Wellman at Brooklyn College, her approach to playwriting is dominated by the negative postulates of the avant-garde, whose two major principles might be expressed in this way: 1. Do not pander to the audiences desire to be entertained and 2. Do not pander to the actors desire to be loved by the audience.

Other featured offers near youLooking for Gallery

Get all of the information you need on Gallery.More Info Visit Website Call (800) 316-7859 to See Your Business Here! Get a 20% Discount If You Call Today. Click Here to Learn More.

In a word, do not pander, a word that also means to pimp. In the terms supplied by dictionary.com, do not pander means: do not cater to the vices or weaknesses of others. In the worst cases, what this anti-pandering stance towards art can do is make for a bald puritan aesthetic in which the spirit of show-and-tell is extinguished through dull minimalism or by employing language that no one but the initiated can decode. The vices and weaknesses of all involved may be kept at bay by these strategies, but it really is no fun. At a recent performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art, YJLs The Shipment did not take Summer Finales and PremieresRachel wins Big Brother, Survivor premiere, more hot TV. What's worth watching

http://www.examiner.com/events-in-south-bend/young-jean-lee-s-aversion-therapy-theater-provokes-weird-laughter[9/15/11 10:46:40 PM]

Young Jean Lee's aversion therapy theater provokes weird laughter - South Bend events | Examiner.com

these routes, but another one: the route of parody, in which clichs and stereotypes of racial identity are reproduced in order to dismantle them. We were, in other words, pounded with ugly

More in EntertainmentMichaele Salahi found, more celebs New Breaking Dawn trailer released Movies opening this weekend New Taylor Armstrong revelationsThe Best in Books: See our picks

words and overly-familiar formulas of racial hatred or disgust. Time Out had it exactly right when it reported in response to an earlier piece by Lee that she piles her deconstructive scorn upon ethnic stereotypes. This kind of fun keeps everyone interested. It feels dangerous. At its best it has the kind of value people refer to when they say it makes you think. The Shipment is divided into three parts. In the first section, the audience is abused by a smooth-

talking comic. In the second, racial stereotypes are acted out woodenly as commentary. While ostensibly political, these sections of the play are also blunt to the point of being dumb and while its dumbness is clearly on purpose, the joke of being purposely dumb gets old fast. Then, everything changes. When the lengthy third section begins, its seems, momentarily, like a solution is at hand. Suddenly the actors are in another play. They banter with each other, decked out for a cocktail party. Their clothes are expensive and they talk white. All of this makes it difficult to make a clear and final assessment of the play. In the end, the goal of the play seems to have been self-awareness, for this is what YJL later said during the talkback, and we did, in fact, feel something that might be called awareness, though probably it would be better described as a feeling of being in the wrong. This was especially true at a certain point when the house lights went up and the actors came to the front of the stage and pointedly stared into the crowd with a gaze that was neutral but still accusatory. How could one not feel wrong, sitting there watching oneself be watched? In the hard silence, the criticism being launched from the stage seemed implicitly to be about the watching itself: why, the actors seemed to be saying, are you watching this racist crap in the first place? O complacent ones, if you really cared, you would be doing something to change this screwed up world instead of just sitting there. From the beginning, it was the audience even more than the actors that was in the spotlight, each individual member put in the position of situating him- or herself in relation to the crap-flow from the stage. Overall, the response from the audience was odd. A weirdly out-of-control laughter was heard rolling over us in waves as audience members either got sucked into the awkward communal thing or sat apart. In the first section of the play, we were instructed to put yer motherfuckin hands together for Douglas Streater, who turned out to be a talented performer whose Chris Rock-style stand-up routine made the audience howl. His offend-the-audience routine had the crowd, with the exception of one guy, immediately in stitches. The guy was an elderly white man who, despite the rather feeble clutchings of his female companion, emitted a loud what a jerk towards Streater on stage. A few minutes later, the guy stood up unsteadily, though it was unclear, as he exited, whether it was the booze or the aging that made him shake and interrupt. He had to be a plant, said the woman behind us definitively. We didnt think so. A good portion of the audience had just come from a fundraising dinner ($100 a head), and it was clear that alcohol had taken some toll on some of them. Streater watched the guy, impressed enough to break character. Wow, he said. Thats the first time someones given a vocal response. In an interview at the Walker, YJL discusses audiences with the curator Philip Bither, calling herself something like a connoisseur of laughter. After touring her shows in Europe and elsewhere, she says she has a gut instinct for the quality of the audiences laughter. This

South Bend business directory

PizzaSEARCH Search

Popular searches: South Bend Auto Repair,

Estate Sales and Services, South Bend Attorneys, South Bend Lodging

South Bend Food and Dining, South Bend Real

Recent ActivityLogin

You need to be logged into Facebook to see your friends' recent activity. Wrapped up and left to die

1,023 people recommend this. Meet Slate the Pit Bull Mix - Pet Pardons Pet of the Day 1,073 people recommend this. 4 reasons why the Republican Party is the party of death 1,077 people recommend this. 720 people recommend this. Odd couple in need of rescue Pope to be considered for investigation by International Criminal Court l d hi

Facebook social plugin

802

Join Examiner.com on Facebook

Preferred cityRecently in National Wrapped up and left to die 'America's Got Talent' 2011: Winner named, Sharon Osbourne shocked, duets shine Dog lost at Six Flags Magic Mountain returned to owner, pet advocates outragedBack to National change

sensitivity has meant that, on several occasions, she has reported disappointment with her audiences, with their positive reactions, and with the fact and quality of their laughter. In an interview with The New York Times, YJL stated that: . I know thats unfair of me because I wrote it to be funny, and the performers are funny, but I feel there is so much in there that people should not laugh at. Part of me would rather have them sit there in silent uneasiness. Her problem, in part, is with her own success, which publicizes her intentions and methods and preprepares audiences to accept them. Audiences, she said, have been laughing more enthusiastically since the positive reviews have been published.

Amish Acres Corvette ShowOctober 22, 2011, 11am-3pm Free Registration and admission!www.amishacres.com

Any Lab Test South BendDNA, STD, Drug & All Blood Tests South Bend. Call Us 574-217-0642AnyLabTesting.com/SouthBend

Blick Art Materials Huge savings when you buy on-line.



Outstanding service and selection.DickBlick.com

Douglas Streeter At the MCA, Streaters opener was welcomed by an audience who had surely been prepared for what was to come. They were eager as he appeared, wearing the conspiratorial grin of the standup, a recognizable King-of-Comedy-type-stance to both black and white audiences. With our permission, he was only sucking us in for the purposes of spitting us - some of us - right back out again: White people be evil. A pause, laughter. No, Im just fuckin wid you. A pause, laughter. Then: White people be stupid. At this exchange and others like it, the white people in the audience broke down into strange, gulping hysterics, a sight to behold for anyone who wasnt quite feeling it. When Streater lit into black people, which he did once or twice (announcing that the performance was an equal-

opportunity bashing situation), there was less laughter, maybe because there were markedly fewer African-Americans in the audience and the whites, finally uneasy, fell momentarily silent. Soon, though, they were back at it. It was as if the white members of the audience had been given a permission they craved, and that, as a result, some enormous surge of pent-up feeling was finally being let out. At least, that was the way it sounded. It can be unpleasant to listen to people laughing to the point of tears in this way. This animal laughter seemed to be responding to something beyond the jokes in the play. The sound was a raw thing, more like sobbing or throwing up than pleasure. Richard Pryor and now Chris Rock and other black comedians have prepared white audiences to laugh at black people laughing at whites, but the distinction here is that there was no Pryoresque self-abnegation to flavor the bile. Pryors innovation in comedy was also an innovation in autobiographical method. He had been an addict, a bad dad, an abusive husband. His stage act of self-belittling threw his faults in front of the crowd as a kind of plea. Thus, his accusations and parodies, peppered with this offering of himself, made for a sweeter broth. In the opening section of The Shipment, an exaggerated dissimilarity between "them" and "us," feigned by the black actors as a kind of joke, meant that the mood was one of sneering down. It

was more like the Peter Handke play Offending The Audience than either a Pryor/Rock show or even a Routes 1 & 9 by The Wooster Group, in which the rudest clichs of rural, Southern blackness feed an over-the-top parody. As with the Handke, the audience was toyed with, mainly in words. Sometimes their insults came like a slap, just at the point when we expected to be amused, and sometimes they were commented on, offered up in a Brechtian manner that was comforting because it was impersonal and because alienation tequniques we hate to say it -now feel pretty familiar.

In the second of the three sections, the actors played cardboard parts, embodying racial stereotypes: black kid as rapper-turned-bad, soulful grandma turning out Whoopie Goldbergesque advice from beyond the grave, and more. It turned out that these characters had been brought to light by the actors themselves, in sessions that, described by YJL, seemed more like therapy than theater. So, too were the cocktail-party-going characters of the third section. YJL had asked the

actors what characters they would really enjoy playing and, as it turned out, they enjoyed the idea



of playing race-neutral folks engaging in semi-realistic, semi-ridiculous conversation. They wanted to play characters whose problems were not about race. The goal of the work is purportedly more pedagogical and thus liberatory than sadistic, but one interpretation is that YJL is not working towards overcoming anything, including the social

awkwardnesses and rank degradations of racial difference. In the most cynical interpretation, what YJL wants is merely to preserve her upper hand vis--vis the public. If that is the case, then she cannot truly be hoping for social change, since her provocateurs upper hand can only be maintained if the status quo itself is maintained. This dependence on social disease is ever the avant-gardes problem. After all, if everybody began to act rightly in accordance with basic principles of justice and decorum, there would be nobody to startle into uncomfortable silence.

Though at a panel at the MCA held earlier last week YJL claimed to hate talk-backs, after the Chicago performance she dutifully tromped out on stage, sat down and, flanked by her all-black

cast, spoke unsmilingly about the process of making the show. In speaking, she professed a strange solidarity with her actors otherness, though she also said she had started from a place of knowing nothing about blackness. She said that, after trying a show about Asian identity, she had

decided to challenge herself to create a show about something she claimed no one wanted to talk about: black identity. One wonders what she means, since American society has always seemed, for better and for worse, fascinated by black culture. Probably she is referring to her world, the artand-academic-world, where political correctness has created an environment of caution, particularly among non-black faculty and students. Caution is obviously not the same as respect. Instead, it is a repression requiring some release, like pus from a wound, and it makes sense that YJL, who had once started a dissertation on King Lear at Berkeley, would want to make a job for herself as releaser extraordinaire. Favorite Streater line: For all you white people out there who walk on eggshells when black people are around, who are so afraid of saying the wrong thing KEEP IT UP! We absolutely love it! Who can blame JYL for not liking talkbacks? The whole pedagogical ritual that is scheduled by particular kinds of teaching institutions can be a rude break if the show had your imagination captured. The lights go back up, the performers shower and come back tired, feeling like the real job is already done. Then the folding chairs come out, the director sits down, the questions begin and the starkness of meta-critical language gradually dispels the previous mood. For an event like this, it also really turned the tables, with YJL sitting in the seat of inspection fielding the curiosity of the audience. She answered their queries in statements like questions. I cast the shows before I write them? Then I write them with the casts input during rehearsal. She talked about the workshops that led to the play as it is. Apparently it was going to be hip-hopbased, but it was badly received in workshop performances and she started afresh, firing most of the actors. People were dismissive? Like very very condescending. Like weve seen this before? Like this is the kind of Dave Chappelle-television humor, its way too simplistic? (We could not help thinking, at this, that they had a point about Dave Chappelle, but not about his being simplistic.)

She also answered the question every audience member must have wondered about, namely: Why (on earth) did an Asian-American woman want to write a show about the African-American experience of racism? She answered that after completing her own (tongue-in-cheek) version of an Asian-American show, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, she wanted to challenge herself to make something even harder. Implicit in the audience's question is the accusation of

inauthenticity, which she is quick to defend. While some might have defended a different position, perversely embracing the fact of not knowing black culture as a mode of expressing something about inter-racial understanding, she took a different tack, saying that the material was all generated by the actors in her company. I dont know anything, she said. I had no content. She invited actors to come to rehearsal ready to talk. Bring your stuff to the table, she told them. She then molded and remolded the show from the raw material of their feelings and experiences a process, one notes, that itself could be deconstructed as a form of exploitation if one wanted to ignore the author's intentions, which were to challenge herself as much as the audience. Although at one point in the discussion at the Walker, YJL claims she is almost immune to

criticism, what YJL said at the MCA was that what she didnt like about talkbacks was facing a



crowd that had negative things to say. She didn't like the criticism. But who really likes to face up to outright criticism? Not even YJL, a celebrated writer already in her mid-30s, a woman who was just given a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ultimately, Young

Jean Lee, who courts discomfort with an almost religious spirit of sacrifice, accepted her obligation to listen and explain with good humor. After all, she is in a position to know for certain that, while audiences at the MCA may think they are comfortable with being made uncomfortable by art, the mechanics of this operation still need to be discussed. She expresses these mechanics in moving and personal terms terms that depart from her companys rowdy and confrontational motto destroy the audience": When starting a play, I ask myself, Whats the last play in the world I would ever want to write? Then I force myself to write it. I do this because Ive found that the best way to make theater that unsettles and challenges my audience is to do things that make me uncomfortable. I work with stories that I find trite and embarrassing, I keep the development of the text as open and unstable as possible throughout the rehearsal and

performance process, and I emphasize rather than hide problems in the text and production. Im constantly trying to find value in unexpected places. My work is about struggling to achieve something in the face of failure and incompetence and not-knowing. The discomfort and awkwardness involved in watching this struggle reflects the truth of my experience. (from her artist statement). For more information on her recent award: Academy of Arts and Letters For more information on YJL: www.youngjeanlee.org/homeAdvertisement

Ads by Google

Theater Plays

Dramatic Play

Comedy Play

Comedy Theater

Life's a beach: The 10 best Buying the dream for $9K Is self-employment the way to go? Help a couple win a dream wedding More ... The Corvette: The American dream car? See why more sports car enthusiasts love this vintage beauty.

Email

Print

Report

By Jessica Peri Chalmers

Get my newsletter



South Bend Events Examiner Jessica Peri Chalmers has written articles for The Village Voice, Flash Art and other publications. She is a playwright and filmmaker with a PhD...

Get my RSS feed Become an Examiner

Read full bio

Convert VHS to DVDConvert your VHS videos to DVD. Give a memorable gift. 574-807-9105www.ashwothit.com

Chitika | Opt out?

Save on South Bend HotelsHotel Deals in South Bend, Indiana. Compare Prices, Save up 75%.SouthBend.Indiana.Hotel.net

South Bend, IN HotelsCompare prices at leading sites to easily find low prices.www.point-travel.com

Commentslecture performance Theater

Connect with Examiner.comExaminer.com blog Become a fan Follow us on Twitter Join us on Foursquare Connect on LinkedIn View our RSS Feeds Follow us on Tumblr

ResourcesMobile Sitemap

CompanyAdvertise About Us

NowPublic.comWorld News Technology

Today in Photos RSS Feeds Careers Traffic Weather

Contact Us In the Press Walden Media AEG Worldwide

Foundation for a Better Life

Business Entertainment & Culture Environment Health Sports Style Strange

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Examiner.com is the inside source for everything local. We are powered by Examiners, the largest pool of knowledgeable and passionate contributors in the world. Examiners provide unique and original content to enhance life in your local city wherever that may be. Examiners come from all walks of life and contribute original content to entertain, inform, and inspire their readers. They are credible, passionate and influential because of their knowledge of a particular topic. Want to join their ranks? Become an Examiner

Copyright Clarity Digital Group LLC d/b/a Examiner.com. All Rights reserved.

Thanks for visiting. Terms of Use

Privacy Policy


Documents

Theater Review, Young Jean Lee